Restaurants and food service establishments often apply various food sauces to sandwiches, meats, desserts, and many other food products. For example, ketchup, mayonnaise, or mustard may be repeatedly applied to hamburgers or cold cut sandwiches in such a restaurant. Similarly, salad dressing may be repeatedly applied to salads. These and other sauces must be dispensed frequently and repeatedly in carefully controlled portions to ensure consistency in the foods served. In many cases, the amount of sauce that is to be dispensed to each individual meal must be of a relatively small volume. In addition, many restaurant kitchens have limited storage and maneuverability space and, therefore, the dispensing device must be easy to use, convenient to store, and maneuverable within the confines of a small kitchen or food prep area.
The conventional solution to repetitive restaurant saucing has been to package sauces in cartridges from which the sauces are dispensed using hand held dispensing guns, similar to caulking guns. The amount of sauce that is dispensed is typically controlled by providing a valve in the dispensing end of the cartridge and advancing the gun plunger against a movable plug within the cartridge a consistent distance each time the dispensing gun trigger is squeezed. The plunger's movement against the plug causes a measured amount of sauce to be extruded out of the valve at the end of the cartridge.
The caulk-like gun dispenser has disadvantages, however. The gun dispenser requires a long rod attached to its plunger, which takes up a lot of space in the kitchen and is difficult to maneuver in tight spaces. In addition, the sauce cartridges are bulky and require storage space in the kitchen. Likewise, the sauce cartridges become waste after use and are bulky to dispose of. Lastly, the amount of sauce to be dispensed is not accurately adjustable. Through much ingenuity and hard work, however, the inventors have developed a dispenser that allows controlled, consistent, and adjustable portioning of sauces and semi-solid products without the need for a bulky, wasteful dispensing guns, cartridges, and related components.